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Back in 2011, a few weeks before I left Groundwire (R.I.P.), I was at a nonprofit conference down in southern Oregon. I was delighted to run into Dianne Russell, who runs the Institute from Conservation Leadership. Dianne’s been doing organizational capacity building work in the environmental sector for… well, pretty much forever and has always been one of those people I’ve admired as we worked over the years with many of the same great people and organizations.

So there we were in the lobby, catching up, talking about the weather, our kids, I don’t quite remember. But then out of nowhere, Dianne dropped this idea on me:

“I’ve been thinking lately,” she said (and I paraphrase slightly), “that we capacity builders have really screwed up. We’ve systematically miseducated funders about the true cost of doing the work.”

I swear that the clouds parted and a great beam of light shone down on us. (Never mind that we were indoors.) I heard the clap of thunder, but maybe it was just the sound of my jaw hitting the concrete floor.

I picked it up and said, “Oh, wow. You are… totally… right. I never thought of it that way before. How come I never thought of it that way before?”

In an instant, I flashed through all of the ways I’d failed at pricing over 15 years of doing mostly-below-market-rate technology and communications consulting to environmental nonprofits:

Giving work away for free: FAIL. very few clients truly value what they’re not paying for, and a price of “free” makes it really easy to fail to invest in making new tools and knowledge sustainable.

Charging meaningful but “below-market” rates: FAIL. This is a more subtle way to fail. When you charge a meaningful amount, clients have “skin in the game” and that’s good. You have far fewer failing projects. But think back to Econ 101 — if you price below market, demand is infinite, and every unit of below-cost service you deliver is another unit of charitable subsidy you have to raise. So, while each project is great and your clients love you, you are digging a hole to hell with your good intentions.

Charging “the low end of market rate:” NOT A TOTAL FAIL, BUT DANG HARD. Here, your clients are happy and you’re not losing money hand over fist, but you’re trapped in the tyranny of the billable hour and the constant struggle to keep staff from being poached by higher-paying for-profits, etc.

But, despite having experienced all of this failure modes, I hadn’t really thought about how underpricing affects funders — who, along with the nonprofits themselves, are often “the customer” for capacity building services, even though they are not “the client.”

As we tie on our superhero capes and leap into action, we often fail to calculate our true costs. And even more often, we fail to disclose that full cost either to our clients or to our funder/customers. This happens for many reasons, all of them sincere and well-meaning.

We capacity builders, with our zeal to get the work done — after all, there’s so much good work that desperately needs doing — we’re wizards at cobbling together a few bucks here, a few bucks there. And maybe we feel a little bit guilty about charging all that money to do good work. We’ve usually got at least a touch of impostor syndrome (“we’re not really that good”) so we hem and haw and there are a thousand reasons why we just sort of don’t get around to really showing everyone who’s paying for a piece of our pie just how much the whole pie really costs.

This is all well and good and well intended. The clients are happy, the funders are happy and the capacity builder might even be pretty happy too. But over the not-so-long term, Bad Things Start to Happen:

Even if you’ve been rigorous about showing all your cross-subsidies, the cumulative effect of underpricing is that it affects what funders (and clients) are willing to pay for future capacity building engagements. This is what my economist friends call “price anchoring.” Over time it means that funders (and clients) start to believe that below cost is what it costs and, worse, that’s all it’s worth. This means that if a future capacity builder should have the temerity to charge enough to cover their full costs (including the cost of paying people competitive salaries, not burning them out with overwork, etc.), they are very likely to be told, “Sorry, that’s too expensive. Last time I only paid $BELOW-COST-PRICE.”

Let me be clear: it’s not that clients and funders are naive or that they are trying to abuse us by setting up a race to the bottom. Prices are signals and prices are stories, and our prices are telling lies that have, over time, systematically miseducated our customers (and our clients) about the underlying economic reality of the work.

What tech skills should mission-driven nonprofits expect all of their employees to master?

I’m not talking about what we should expect the “digital” people to know — or the IT staff. These folks are always going to require a deeper set of particular skills that are going to vary greatly depending on their role and the particular organization. I’m asking a bigger and more abstract question: what skills should we expect of everyone who works in an organization trying to make change in the world — from the CEO to the administrative assistants, and everyone in between.

Is it simply enough to expect “proficiency with Word, Excel and Outlook?” Or, in 2014, should we be expecting more?

I think we can and should expect more.

Let’s start by unpacking the notion of “proficiency” with “basic office productivity software.” There’s more here than meets the eye. Here’s my list of tasks I’d expect someone who has solid “intermediate proficiency” with the basic tools that are essential to modern mission-driven work to be able to perform.

1. Format a document with style-based formatting, both in a word processor and in a website content management system
2. Create, share and organize online documents and spreadsheets.
3. Use “tracked changes” or similar document revision features to collaborate on a document with others
4. Perform a basic mail merge from a spreadsheet, and be able to translate basic mail merge concepts to online tools such as broadcast email systems
5. Compose and send a lightly-branded broadcast email message that looks good on a mobile phone
6. Sort and filter a list in a spreadsheet
7. Use common spreadsheet formulas to analyze data like SUM, AVERAGE, MEDIAN
8. Create a simple chart or graph that follows most of Edward Tufte’s rules of good information design
9. Crop and resize an image for use on the web or in an email
10. Create a lightly formatted but professional-looking set of presentation slides that are compliant with an organization’s brand guidelines
11. Set up and use an LCD projector
12. Host and deliver a presentation online through webinar or online meeting software.
13. Use text/video chat software like Skype, Google Hangouts, etc. for real-time communication with colleagues
14. Manage one’s calendar online
15. Book appointments with colleagues and partners electronically
16. Use a password manager to generate and use secure passwords for online services
17. Build a simple online survey and interpret the results
18. Create rules or filters in an email client to organize your inbox
19. Track tasks with a team using tools like Trello, Asana, Basecamp or Evernote
20. Export a list of names or other data from one system in CSV format and upload the list into another system
21. Create and manage an email discussion list
22. Look up and edit contact information for constituents in a CRM database system
23. Bonus: design the agenda for and facilitate an effective small group meeting

Bet you weren’t expecting 23 items. (Hey, did I leave anything important out? Leave a comment!)

Seriously: imagine how much more efficient and effective our organizations would be if we could count on all of our colleagues and allies to have mastered these basic skills.

I’m not naive; this is a high bar. Is the solution then to raise our hiring standards? Maybe. When I’m hiring folks, I certainly attempt to gauge how solid their technology skills are. But I realize that there are a lot of smart, bright and capable folks out there who couldn’t tick all of these boxes. That’s OK. College is supposed to teach you to read, write and think — it’s not supposed to be vocational education.

This means that employers need to be ready to train their people in the practical skills they need to excel in the workplace. Part of the job of any social mission organization is to bring in smart, bright and capable people and help them grow. This takes a strong organizational commitment to making those investments — and a strong organizational culture of peer learning. And you can be sure I am looking to hire people who are motivated and ready to learn (and to teach!).

Folks who are already in the social change workforce: you should see mastering as many of these skills as possible as an essential part of your job. These are the building blocks of 21st century social mission work.

Update 7/4/2014: edited slightly to incorporate great feedback from commenters below and on social media. Thanks, keep the feedback coming!

I was chatting today with my friend Sameer about the challenges and opportunities in volunteer management software and had a bit of a realization: it’s crazy that we don’t have an open data standard for volunteer opportunities, so that organizations can publish a machine-readable list of volunteer opportunities on their websites, and let them get picked up and syndicated by services like VolunteerMatch and Idealist that specialize in aggregating and curating volunteer opportunities.

I’m thinking of something like RSS (or even better, ATOM), which provides a simple, open standard for publishing information about articles on websites so that they could easily be picked up, remixed and syndicated to reach a far larger audience.

Let’s call it “VSS” (Volunteer Syndication Standard). I haven’t thought about this deeply, and I’m no expert on designing protocols like this, but I would start by seriously examining ATOM, the most modern RSS-like standard for publishing articles. I’d also look at hATOM for inspiration about how to embed machine-readable data directly into a standard webpage. EDIT: Probably also .ics (the standard for event syndication, because volunteer opportunities often–but not always–resemble events.)

It would be hard to inspect one’s navel to design this right, so I’m not even going to try. But I’d definitely definitely want to include folks like:

Organizations that publish lots of volunteer opportunities

Organizations that aggregate and curate volunteer opportunities or recruit volunteers for many organizations

Makers of volunteer management software (or other tools that let groups publish volunteer opportunities online–this could include major CMS platforms, for example)

I think that a standard like this, if sufficiently widely adopted, could unlock a huge amount of innovation in how organizations (and intermediaries) recruit volunteers, especially if it was coupled with another set of standards for intermediaries to use to push data about volunteers directly into groups’ volunteer management databases.

It’s interesting to see how widely the word “engagement” is now being used in the nonprofit tech sector. That’s cool. (I like to think that my colleagues at Groundwire have played a role in spreading this meme.)

But less cool is how often “engagement” seems to be used as a synonym for “marketing.” That’s kind of sad. Nothing against marketing; lord knows the nonprofit sector could stand to get better at it. But I’d like to see more conversation about how to better structure the substance of our work to be more engaging and participatory and how to develop better processes for that kind of engagement. Framing engagement as a marketing challenge reduces what could be transformational down to something more transactional.

I’m very happy to have pushed the “launch” button on Groundwire’s 2010 Website Benchmarks Study, a first-of-its-kind-so-far-as-I-know report that takes an in-depth look at website statistics and online behaviors of 43 small-to-midsized environmental nonprofits.

There’s a ton of useful information, not only about groups’ “raw” website statistics, but also about how much time and energy groups are investing in their web presence. Lots to chew on for nonprofits of any size, but I think it’s especially relevant for groups up to about 50 staff.

One thing I’m particularly proud of is the fact that I was able to develop a highly scalable and repeatable methodology for quickly gathering data, using a combination of a simple, open-source Python script (written by my awesome colleague Matt Yoder) for interacting with Google Analytics and a quick-and-dirty online survey instrument.

We’ve got two open positions at Groundwire right now: one for a CRM database consultant and one for a manager for our “Groundwire Labs” innovation program. Both are incredible opportunities for a creative, entrepreneurial social change technologist who wants to join one of the most accomplished teams in the nonprofit sector.

I’ve been here for nearly 14 years, so I’m happy to field any questions if you’re thinking about applying!

We are now looking for someone to run Groundwire Labs. As the Groundwire Labs Manager, you’ll lead Groundwire’s R&D investments and define the cutting edge of how we use technology to help organizations to do a better job of engaging their communities. It’s all with an eye to our mission of building a sustainable society.

Center for a New American Dream has a nicely done “Alternative Gift Registry” tool (currently the #4 Google result for “gift registry”!) that allows you to create gift registries that de-emphasize consumerism (used goods, donations to charity, experiences rather than stuff, etc.). This is a great example of a nonprofit advocacy group coming up with a valuable public-facing service that is grounded in its mission and expertise to bring people into the circle of engagement.

After some soul-searching, and a prod from my dear friend and inspiration role model Sam Dorman, I’ve decided to unplug myself from “web 2.0,” “the social nets” or whatever we call the rapidly-expanding tarpit of social networking sites these days.

Long story short: I’m increasingly convinced that the constant stream of tweets, status updates, Facebook wall posts and the like are causing me more cognitive harm than professional or personal benefit. And I deeply suspect that they’re harming us as a society, too. (See “Skinner Box? There’s an App for that!” for more on this.)

I’m not going cold turkey from the internet. That’s not what this is about. I’m going to continue reading email, surfing the web, and maybe taking in a few RSS feeds, since that’s a very convenient way to follow the news. I will continue to blog (and hope to write more in the future since I won’t be as distracted by constant consumption!) I might even keep my Facebook account after paring it down to people who are actually real-world personal friends. But I’m ditching Twitter, unsubscribing from most of my “professional” RSS feeds, and am going to basically pull out of the “real-time web.” Our brains just aren’t meant to work this way, and I can feel it harming my work, my personal life, and my happiness.

“Surely you just need to manage this stuff better, Jon,” you might be thinking. Well, maybe, but if you know me, you know that I am an extremely disciplined person and am about as far from an “addictive personality” as it gets. Heck, I didn’t even have an internet connection at home until 2001, and then only because my wife made me! If I am suddenly finding myself experiencing addictive behaviors with web 2.0 tools, I’m pretty sure it’s because these qualities are deeply wired into the technology, not into my personality. Also, if you think that “technology is completely neutral, it’s just about how we use it,” then please go stop and go read “In the Absence of the Sacred” before deciding whether you really want to pursue that line of argument.

So, in short, I won’t be seeing you on Twitter or Facebook so much anymore. But please do drop me a line, give me a call, let’s go get some coffee or a hoist a pint. Let’s go for a walk, a hike, a bike ride. Let’s play some music together, or cook some food.

And if you’re feeling a little stressed out by the constant chatter of your online “friends,” then I invite you to join me in easing back out and into the sunlight. See you in the real world, person-to-person!

It occurred to me yesterday that the real challenge we[1] face is not the question of “how do we apply technology tools to organizations?” but more “how do we help organizations & people transform themselves so that they are more able to harness the power of technology?”

[1] “we” = those of us standing astride the worlds of technology and social change.

Coolness is not innovation. That which is innovative is not always cool. More importantly, that which is cool is not always innovative. Indeed, cool can be seen as inherently conservative. If an invention is not already well on its way to adoption in certain (possibly small, probably themselves cool) circles, then it is too obscure to be cool. Even if we’d never use the actual word “cool” to define our choices, the desire for coolness is powerful. It provides us with the appearance of innovation without the inherent risks of the real thing. Mistaking coolness for innovation is far from trivial. It leads to large scale investments in promises of change that do not materialize. It causes genuine innovations, which don’t tap into established tropes or status in the same way, to languish in obscurity.

Any sufficiently overheated industry will eventually resemble high school. High school is filled with insecurity, social climbing, backbiting, false friends, faux achievements, high drama and not much content. Much of this insecurity comes from a market that doesn’t make good judgments, that doesn’t understand how to reliably choose between alternatives. So it turns into a popularity contest.

Marketers have been lousy at harvesting attention because there was just so much of it. So it was more like strip mining than careful, efficient use of a natural resource. Now that attention is harder to get, people are overpaying for it and the Olympics is just one example. The alternative is to create focused, intense networks that ignore the masses. For most marketers, that’s exactly what we need.

I think it would be very interesting to take a truly random sample of nonprofits (any ideas on a good methodology?), and do some online research to find out how many of these nonprofits are actually being talked about “organically” online.

My bet: under 10%.

This thought occurred to me because so many social media consultants seem to be saying something to the effect of, “Hey people are talking about you online whether you want them to or not.” With the implied followup, “So you’d best hire me to help you figure out how to listen and engage.” I’m not so sure.

Lots of nonprofit technologists are unapologetic Apple fanboys (and girls). I’ve owned and used Apple products over the years, and while some have been fine, they rarely make me swoon. I think of Apple as just another mega-corporation that sometimes makes nice computer hardware, not some extension of my personal brand identity.

Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and charitable contributions through the iPhone are strictly prohibited. They can’t even be talked about, Shapiro says, because Apple doesn’t want to deal with the possibility of charity scams, there’s tax complications, the platform’s standard 30% fee for payments isn’t tenable in a non-profit context and Apple has no financial incentive to solve this sticky complex of problems.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be taking a sabbatical from ONE/Northwest, beginning around July 20th and lasting through early November!

After 13 years at ONE/Northwest, I’m feeling a little fatigued. Worse, I feel like I’ve become disconnected from the wellspring of inspiration that makes social change work possible. I need to simultaneously unplug and reconnect.

I plan to use this time to relax, recharge, do some hiking, take some photos, read a bunch, talk with lots of folks and refill the idea-tank that has sustained my journey in the environmental and open-source movements over the past decade. Of course, I don’t expect to find much of that inspiration in my navel, so I hope to be buying many of you coffee, beer and/or ice cream in the next few months, or at the very least to hit you up on Skype.[1]

I’m profoundly grateful to ONE/Northwest for getting a sabbatical policy in place and allowing me to beta test it.[2] Time to recharge is an incredible gift, and it’s an amazing feeling to be part of such a supportive team and to know that the work will be in such great hands while I’m gone.

A few logistical notes:

My ONE/Northwest email will continue to work, although I will be checking it much less frequently. Please feel free to email me (jonstahl at gmail.com) if you need to reach me. I’m eager to hear about what is exciting and inspiring you to change the world.

Dave Averill is ONE/Northwest’s main point of intake for new work, so if you’re not sure who to talk to at ONE/Northwest about something, he’s a great starting point. (davida at onenw.org)

Plone community friends: I’ll continue to serve in my role as Plone Foundation board president, and I look forward to seeing you at Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest this October!

Be seeing you!

[1] If that plan sounds a little vague, you’re right! My plan is to have no plan for at least a few weeks. I know many of you have taken sabbaticals: if there’s something I absolutely must do (or avoid doing), I’d love to hear about it!

[2] I hope we follow in the footsteps of Sightline Institute and make sabbaticals mandatory. That’s hardcore sustainability!

While the article provides a pretty good overview of the space, it leaves out a few supporting details that I think are worth noting:

Idealware’s article mentions that many CMS platforms have some email discussion list support, including Democracy In Action, Convio, Kintera, Drupal and Joomla, but neglects to mention that Plone also has such features, through its add-on product Listen.

Idealware’s article mentions the great folks at Electric Embers, DGroups and OnlineGroups as nonprofit-oriented discussion list providers, but neglects to also mention the team at The Open Planning Project, whose OpenPlans service offers a very powerful, user-friendly web-and-email discussion list experience.

Idealware’s article gives rather short shrift to several powerful open-source email discussion list solutions that enable more sophisticated groups to take control of their own discussion list hosting. Sympa and Mailman are probably the two leaders. Idealware dismisses Mailman in passing, saying it and (unnamed) similar tools “aren’t as easy to use as many others, and don’t include features like archives or online groups. They can also make it difficult to view or export a file of the list of subscribers.”While it’s true that Mailman and Sympa don’t have the polished usability of some commercial discussion tools, they do include web-based archives and offer simple subscriber views and one-click export of the subscriber list. Some hosting providers may disable archiving, but that’s not the software’s fault.

The host-it-yourself path is not for everyone, since it does require some technical expertise to configure and maintain, but that’s also true of many of the solutions Idealware does mention.

Overall, good article, worth a read. I hope Idealware will consider incorporating some of these additional details to round it out a bit more.

This description might even work, right? But it has all the symptoms of fast fix obsession. It elevates and preys on nonprofit anxiety. It throws in some brand name buzzwords to leverage the appeal of the latest cool thing. Most importantly, it promises to reduce online fundraising to a set of tiny quick wins.

You can’t afford to fall behind. Those online donors are being scooped up by organizations that are on the ball when it comes to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and all the other places new donors are hanging out. With this webinar, you’ll have the secrets for getting your share. Each of the 27 online fundraising tips, tricks, and hacks are free and can be implemented in minutes!

Don’t get me wrong: Quick wins are great. As students, we all need the
feeling that we can hit the ground running and see at least some
immediate progress for our efforts. This is especially true when we’re
working on large projects. But the quick wins have become an end in
themselves, rather than just another part of a balanced toolkit for
teaching.

This misplaced emphasis on fast fixes is truly harmful in several ways.
(1) After delivering some quick satisfaction, it sets us up for
disappointment when those tips don’t add up to anything. (2) It
encourages sloppy thinking on the part of both students and teachers,
generating lists of vaguely related ideas rather than coherent
frameworks for thinking about the topic. (3) It fails to build the
underlying strategies that in turn would make tips genuinely effective.
(4) By asking so little of us, it appeals to and encourages our worst
selves.

I see this third force everywhere. I see it hiding inside the inaccurately named thing called â€œsocial networking. I see it embedded in â€œAmerican Idol.â€ It follows me to the grocery store. It wakes me up at night. Itâ€™s busy working away on web pages and formatting RSS feeds. Itâ€™s reading your electric meter. Itâ€™s even there when you drive into a parking lot. Itâ€™s monitoring air quality, or temperature, and itâ€™s in that vending machine down the hall tracking the ever-so-important availability of cheese-doodles.

The third force is all about the network and itâ€™s all about the collapse of time. Itâ€™s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what theyâ€™ve tasted. Sometimes itâ€™s frightening.

I once characterized the third force as the move â€œfrom sampling to monitoring.â€ I figured soon we wouldnâ€™t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to â€œreal-timeâ€ measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. Itâ€™s come true.

The following day, I co-led a session on this topic with AngusParker. Two of the participants were dealing with the specific challenge of connecting members of a national network of leaders in reproductive health, so we used that as a case study. We decided to use Clay’s contention to frame the problem, resulting in this whiteboard:

What do you notice about this picture?

Obviously, the Tools column is completely empty. That’s a dead giveaway that I’m facilitating this discussion. (That and the horrific handwriting.) Figure out the basics first. Don’t let the question about technology drive the discussion.

During the discussion, one of the participants asked, “What tools can we use?”

I responded, “Let’s not worry about that now.” So we kept talking and talking, and I noticed the two non-technical participants in the group squirming like crazy.

So I stopped, noticed how gaping the Tools column looked, and said, “You’re uncomfortable about not having discussed the tools, aren’t you.”

She nodded.

“Don’t worry about it,” I responded. “The tools part will be easy, once we figure everything else out.”

“Easy for you, maybe,” she said. “You already know what goes there.”

That was not quite true, but I got her point, and the force of it struck me so hard, I had to stop for a moment. I looked at the gap, and I saw possibilities. She looked at the gap, and she saw a void. That was upsetting for her. It made it hard for her to think about the other aspects of the problem.

It made me realize how much I take my technology literacy for granted. But it also created an opportunity to discuss how easily we are sidetracked by technology. “Tool” does not have to mean software, and making that assumption prevents us from exploring other viable, possibly better solutions.

I’ll add in a kicker: too often, people who are less technically literate think that if they only fill in the right answer in that middle “Tools” column, that their problems will all be solved. When, really, it is more important to get the Promise and the Bargain right. I like to call this pattern “magical tool thinking.” It results in a lot of wasted time and effort trying to identify that magical, right tool — effort which should go into thinking about process, objectives and how to sustain the non-technological parts of the organizing effort.